Jamie O'Neill: At Swim, Two Boys

By SUE YOUNGER

This tender love story between two boys is set in Ireland in the year leading up to the 1916 Easter Uprising.

Jamie Mack is motherless, innocent and sensitive. Every day he goes for an exhilarating swim with his friend Doyler who is bright but poor and has been damaged by the excesses of an alcoholic father. The boys are intensely sensual and struggle to understand their strong feelings for one another.

Their country is in as much turmoil as their 15-year-old hearts. What does it mean to grow up Irish? Doyler's a confirmed rebel but Jamie is confused as to how he is supposed to view Britain. His father fought for the King in South Africa and his beloved brother is away fighting the Hun.

The book traces two parallel struggles - for freedom for Ireland and for acceptance for those men who, unspeakably, desire other men.

In both cases the most significant battleground is for the hearts and minds of the oppressed. Catholicism, Irish history and small-town conservatism are the forces shaping adolescent Mack and Doyler and filling them with shame and self-hatred, helping to ensure their defeat in both struggles.

Doyler leaves to join the rebellion but he and Jamie promise to meet a year hence, at Easter, 1916 and swim to a small island where they will raise the Irish flag and claim a small piece of the world for their country and their love for one another.

As tensions build and the fractured rebellion staggers into being, Doyler and Mack are caught up in events way beyond their understanding. In Ulysses, Joyce has Dedalus say, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape." This provides a perfect description of the events that befall O'Neill's two heroes.

Written over 10 years while O'Neill worked at night as a hospital porter, this book is full of love. Love for Irish literary tradition. Love for language. Love for the poor, the oppressed and the alcoholic. Love for the young and innocent. Love for history. And a huge, sprawling, anguished love for Ireland. This book's got soul, no doubt about it. And its heart is blazoned on its sleeve.

But it has to be said that the writing style will polarise readers. I found it intensely irritating - over-wrought, mannered and undisciplined.

Yet some are hailing O'Neill as the next great Irish writer. Well, maybe, if you like sentences like this: "The boy enraptured him. What joy it was to pray with him, to hear the delicate pant of his soul as heavenward it soared. She reigned, resplendent with miracles, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, but terrible as an army set in array."

There's no doubt that Joyce is O'Neill's literary hero. The relationship this novel has with Ulysses is another problem that will polarise readers.

At what point does building on the tradition of the past, or being "influenced" by the masters, turn into poor imitation? Joyce lovers will either hate O'Neill as a derivative wannabe or they will enjoy playing spot the reference, the location, the character or the scene straight out of Ulysses.

Like Joyce, O'Neill has a deep understanding of his countrymen and of humanity. At Swim, Two Boys does offer new insight, particularly into the emotional and sexual life of gay men. But for me, the purple writing style hampers the whole. Told more simply, it would have had far more power.

* Sue Younger is an Auckland documentary-maker.

* Simon and Schuster $34.95